chasing HOM demons

AFAIK, homs are just places where the geometry engine gets confused - usually due to surface complexity.
Have you tried moving the 'balance tree' slider to the right and rebuilding?

God I hate HOMs. All the geometry in your level creates BSP cuts which stretch away from your TV monitor or whatever and affaect the rest of your level. They most often occur when two add brushes overlap. Don't add other things to your level in the hope the BSP hole will go away - find out what brush is causing it then either delete it, move it, or make it semisolid.

hey phrag.....I usually try a rebuild with about a cut rate of 10 rather than 15. Also, in my last level, I noticed that HOM's would creep up when I added a zone barrier, which was intersecting with another brush. Try adding your "eye candy" by intersecting it into the brush that it is touching, which in your case would be the floor. Sometimes this fixes the problem....

Also, if your monitor is comprised of many brushes, do the intersect step (making a brush bigger than your monitor brushes and then intersecting them), this will make the UT engine see it as one brush as opposed to many brushes....

just a thought......

By not having solids overlap, the resulting BSP cuts will be less complex = less chance of it messing up
Also certain other brushes (usu. portals/sheets/invisible coln hulls) when overlapping cause horrible things to happen.
So you're right there

I've been able to save a lot of maps by resizing an overlapped brush after I've already added it.

You'll need to figure out which part of the brush is overlapping, then highlight it and place the pivot point on the opposite side of the brush. (The brush will expand and contract relative to the position of the pivot point)

At this point, I switch off grid snapping and vertex snapping (on the icon bar) and used the resize tool. You'll have to zoom in and eyeball it to make sure the edge of the highlighted brush lines up with its neighbor. After you've resized it in one direction, check the other windows to make sure the brush fits the other ways, too.

If you have a simple brush (a cubical room) overlapping a complex brush (a curvy coridoor or tunnel), you can also use vertex editing to fix the overlap. Switch off the grid and vertex snapping, as before. It will be easier if you edit the wall of the simple brush (only four vertex points to move the wall of a cube, as opposed to a dozen or more points on the complex brush) Don't forget to rebuild.